But I could feel it, walkin' on a country road...

We have had rain twice this week. A few days ago, a ferocious slow-moving thunderstorm passed over, complete with high winds, hail, lightening and a torrential downpour that turned our driveway into a river, edge to edge, with water pouring out of the field and the wet weather spring overflowing its banks.

We were without power for about an hour, which was not too big a price to pay for the lovely water, even if it did come a bit faster than we would have liked.

It rained again today, beginning at about noon, but a very different sort of rain. More like a drizzle, and it has drizzled rain all day long and it is still drizzling as I write this. A perfect, lovely slow shower that falls gently on the ground and soaks in.

The Mollynater expects to go for a her evening walk at about 5 pm, and when her internal clock told her it was time, she was here, by my chair, looking needy and resting her chin on my leg. So. I put on her rain coat, punched my right hand through the bottom of a large plastic bag, wrapped up my broken arm and got it arranged in the sling, got the big umbrella, which I can hold in my right hand, and off we went for a walk.

I guess my feet know where they want me to go walking on a country road.
Walk on down, walk on down, walk on down, walk on down, walk on down a country road.

Na na na na na na na na na na na, country road, yeah, walking on a country road...

Only we did not go walking on this particular country road, which was my favorite place to walk with her until July 3. This lovely tree-lined road runs parallel with the town. To the left is one of the watersheds that runs through town, which one crosses on a low-water bridge, then comes the train tracks, and then on the other side of that is the city park with the walking trail, where I now walk with her most every day, the playground equipment for children, the tennis courts, and the baseball diamonds.

On a warm early evening in late May, one may walk down this road, hear any number of assorted birds singing to each other, the whistle of the coal train as it comes to the first crossing a few miles away, heading toward Springfield from somewhere south and east of here, the sound of burbling water in the watershed, which is flowing a bit thanks to a recent rain, and the crack of an aluminum bat on a softball, over and over, as someone practices hitting.

Unfortunately, I will not be walking on this road again any time soon – at least not without another body next to me to link arms with. I simply cannot fall again and break anything else. I just can’t. So, I have to be content with walking only on smoothly paved roads, unless perhaps I can talk someone else into going with me?

…mysterious ways His wonders to perform

The Molly Wog and I were about three-quarters of the way around the walking path at the city park on Saturday morning when I realized I did not have my cell phone with me.

Don’t leave home without it....

is supposed to be the new watchword, but I had obviously muddled my way out the door with the mail pouch, and the dog, and a plastic sack to pick up her poop, but not the phone.

So when I got home I looked for the cell phone and it was not to be found.

Anywhere. Gone. Missing in action.

I made return trips to town later in the afternoon and again early Sunday morning, retracing everywhere I had gone on Friday that I might have dropped it.

We were feeling rather glum. The phone had 2,200 prepaid minutes on it.

By the time Sunday morning dawned, I was still feeling rather glum but more or less reconciled to the fact that the phone was gone and I needed to let it go and move on.

I almost didn’t say anything in church about it but then suddenly decided to mention it as a prayer request.

No sooner had I finished then Sherril, who is often not there on Sunday because she spends weekends with her kids who are out of town, spoke up, and said…

I found a cell phone on the floor of the post office Friday morning and turned it in at the counter.

Richard wants to know “Did it have a black case?”

“Yep,” she says. “I believe it did…”

We sat there stunned at this unexpected news, and the day suddenly became much less glummy.

The mail at the post office is supposed to be in the boxes by 9 a.m., and that is when the bulk of the box holders arrive to get their mail, most of whom operate businesses in town. A steady stream of people flows in and out of the lobby beginning at 9 a.m., which is when I am usually there. And on occasion I even see Sherril, who is a real estate agent in town.

I did not see her on Friday morning, but I believe God sent her in there right after me so that she would be the one to find my cell phone… and that she would happen to be at church Sunday to tell me…

And this morning my cell phone was safe in my pocket when Molly Wolly Doodle and I made the circuit at the park.

Some would say it was just coincidence that things turned out this way. Not me! His ways are indeed mysterious and wondrous and awesome.

Busier than a one-armed…

One of my father’s favorite sayings when we were kids was “I’m busier than a one-armed paper hanger…” It was guaranteed to get a smile as we imagined the poor soul with one arm struggling to do a job that really needs two arms.

I sort of know the feeling.

Last Wednesday I was walking the dog on some uneven gravel on an alley behind Main Street in town (which I have walked down many, many times) and my ankle sort of rolled, and down I went on my right elbow.

I was hoping that maybe I had just dislocated it. How wrong I was.

I came home from the hospital late in the afternoon on Thursday (July 4) sporting some extensive, new hardware…

and a most miserable cast.

I don’t have any pain from the fracture itself, but the sensation that a colony of ants has taken up residence under the cast is just about driving me nuts.

I figured out how I could keep on editing using my left hand and the index finger of my right for occasional key strokes.

In a little while we are leaving for the first follow-up visit with the orthopedic surgeon. I am hoping to come home with something more reasonable on my arm.

Rembering Egypt...

As the history of Israel progresses through the Old Testament, Egypt becomes a symbol of slavery and oppression, a place from which they need to delivered and which ultimately resulted in the Exodus and some great movie footage a few thousand years later.

But Egypt wasn’t always the oppressor or a bad place to be. In fact, there are probably more stories about Egypt being a place of safe haven than otherwise. If one looks back at how Israel ended up in Egypt in the first place, their move to Egypt saved them. Egypt became an incubator for the Jews: they had food to eat, they were nurtured and protected, and they didn’t have to go to war to fight off any of the peoples who occupied the land that had been promised to them. That came later.

What might have happened to them had the “evil brothers” not sold their younger brother Joseph to traders who were going to Egypt and who in turn sold him… and so unfolds a rather amazing series of “coincidences” that end up with Joseph more or less running things in Egypt at about the time the famine breaks out and…

And then we fast forward to somewhere around the cusp of when B.C. became A.D., where we read the story of a new father who follows the advice he is given in a dream to take his wife and young son and flee to Egypt to escape King Herod, who has murder on his mind… and we know how that turned out.

I didn’t mean to do a Bible study here on the morning of the anniversary of the day I got married 42 years ago, but a scene replayed itself here a few weeks ago that reminded me so pointedly of our own “Egypt” experience.

We left California when our boy was about 18 months old and moved to Oregon, where we stayed for about 2 years before we moved here. Oregon became our Egypt. I don’t have to wonder too hard what would have happened had we not fled to “Egypt”: I am almost positive our marriage would not have survived. 

We had a good spring for strawberries here and Judy invited me to pick berries because she had more than she knew what to do with. Lucky her. Richard decided to tag along to visit with her husband so off we went. It was still overcast from the rain we had received a day or two earlier and I was soggy from the knees down.

The first place we lived in Oregon was in Lebanon. Strawberries grow quite well in that area of the Willamette Valley – and it only takes a transplanted California girl a few seconds to give away that she is not from Oregon by how she pronounces Willamette and indeed, Oregon. The town still has an annual Strawberry Festival.

U-Pick was a way for small landowners to earn extra money in the late 1970s when we were living there, and perhaps it still is. I was more than happy to go into the field and pay for the strawberries I picked.

But our Oregon experience wasn’t mainly about exchanging big city living for rural life and picking fruit and vegetables and learning to can and butchering chickens. It was about the incredible, nurturing friendships we developed among the Mennonite people who lived in the Willamette Valley, and who welcomed us into their homes and into their lives. It was about us being able to start over in a new place so we could stop the destructive cycle that was on the verge of destroying our marriage.

We wanted to stay in Oregon in the worst way, and I am not sure now why it was that we were not able to do that… but we ended up here…

I noticed one thing several hours after we came home from Judy’s with the strawberries.

There was a lot less pain associated with inching down the rows of strawberries when I was 30 years old than there was at 60 something.

My husband has surprised me with an adventure today... and so off we go…

Oh what a time I had with....

I picked up an earworm last night, thanks to something my dearly beloved said, and I have been hearing it off and on all day. Perhaps it will go away if I write about it?

Earworm?

You know, a bit of music or a jingle that you hear in your head over and over even when it is not being played.

Let’s rewind back to the mid-1950s and early 1960s, when Marineland of the Pacific was perched a low cliff above the ocean on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Southern California.

I loved going there. The aquarium had lots of innovations for its time, but I especially liked the nice way it had exhibited its octopus and loved watching that amazing creature with its rather creepy eyes. Marineland must have been a relatively inexpensive place to visit because I remember that we went there fairly often.

On one particular occasion, another family was with us (and I have no clue now who they were), and for almost the entire drive to the attraction, my father and the other man sang the lyrics to Minnie the Mermaid. Fortunately for us, it was not a very long drive.

Never heard of Minnie the Mermaid?

There were several versions of the song with bawdy lyrics, and my mother certainly would not have allowed him to sing the original versions in front of us, so I suspect he sang a G-rated version, such as the one that was on the Lawrence Welk show.



So… moving right along and now it is 2013.

Last night Richard was talking to Miss Molly and I don’t know what she did – and he doesn’t either at this point – but he said,

Molly, you’re a moron.

Actually, of course, she is not a moron. She is fairly smart for a dog.

But reminding myself that she is not a moron was too little and too late… all of a sudden, full-blown in my head, I heard to the tune of Minnie the Mermaid

Oh what I time I had with Molly the Moron, 

as we went walking down the road…

Silly me. Of course writing about it and finding the You-Tube video did not make it go away. Not at all.
It is so much fun remembering my Dad’s humor and exuberance, especially as Father’s Day approaches, I suppose if I have to “hear” Minne the Mermaid for a little while longer before it goes away… that’s OK too.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

It is inevitable that when we venture to California, at least one large family gathering will be planned and photographs are taken. Always. All of us “kids” are now on the far side of 50, and one of us is on the far side of 60. There is now an empty spot in the photographs where my mother used to sit, and one never knows when it will be before yet another face will be missing from the picture.

Having said all that, taking the photograph can be an adventure. We usually start off somewhat composed and behaving ourselves…

 But inevitably, one of my brothers (usually the one with the beard, but sometimes the other one, too) wants us to do something silly. And we always do.

  Naturally, some of these silly pictures are the ones we cherish the most. 

I recently took Molly Wolly Doodle to the groomer to get her spruced up and I thought it would be nice to have a picture of her. But because it is almost impossible to get her to sit still long enough to get the picture taken, I decided to recruit my dearly beloved to help me out.

He is normally quite reluctant to have his picture taken at all, much less to allow me to show it to anybody, but indeed he did this time.

And it started off OK...

but then, well, this happened…

And he did it all on his own. I think he loves this family he married into very much.

Mistakes happen

It is inevitable that anyone who writes is going to make some sort of mistake in grammar, spelling, or punctuation.

I get paid to find the mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation and other style issues in manuscripts written by physicians and other health care providers, as well as those written by my own husband, and I am reasonably good at it. Yet, I often later find mistakes in things I have written for this blog (and other stuff as well) that I simply did not see when I read the post for the “umpteenth” time before finally uploading it.

One of the most embarrassing mistakes I made occurred  when our boy was applying for a grant to attend the Vocational-Technical school: I spelled his name wrong on the application papers and we had to begin all over again, which caused some delay in the grant. So I get it that “mistakes happen.”

A few years ago, two young men, Jeff Michael Deck and Benjamin Douglas Herson, who called themselves “The Comma Bombers,” wrote a book about their cross-country quest to persuade the creators of signs with errors in them – signs of all sorts but mostly signs in businesses -- to fix the signs. Sometimes they were able to persuade the business owner to fix the sign, and sometimes not. 

And sometimes they took it upon themselves to fix the sign without permission, and once when they did that, they ended up in a spot of trouble. They corrected an apostrophe on a historic hand-painted sign near the Grand Canyon and were sentenced to a $3,000 fine and a year's probation by a federal judge.

Which brings me to a recent mistake I saw. One of our town’s best and brightest decided to add her personal opinion about someone to the back wall of one of the businesses in town. I say “her” because I am guessing this was a teenaged girl. I dunno, it just seems like something a teenaged girl would do.

I was walking the Mollynater down the alley behind the building when I happened to see this:

Which resulted in some laughter when I came home and told Richard about it. 

That in turn, led to what happened at the conversation we had yesterday. I had read on the National Public Radio Web site that guinea pig is being promoted as a good source of meat in South America because, among other things, it has a small carbon footprint and a good conversion ratio of food to meat, is economical to feed, is small, and easily housed. Groups like the Heifer Project, which tries to provide sustainable food sources for impoverished people in undeveloped countries, has added guinea pig to the list of animals it provides in South America.

I had guinea pigs as pets when I was a kid, and I remember them as delightful little animals. I like guinea pigs. In fact, not all that long ago I talked about getting a guinea pig for a pet.

Richard wanted to know if I wanted to start raising guinea pigs for us to eat.

Honestly, could you kill and eat a guinea pig?

Sure. Why not? I like chickens, and I killed them and ate them. I like ducks, and I killed and ate them. I have killed rabbits. Yeah.  I could kill a guinea pig and eat it.

He looked at me with a very straight face and said, 

“You’re a heartless bicth.”

And then we laughed and laughed.

Do you hear what I hear…

In some areas in the eastern part of the country there will be an emergence of the 17-year periodical cicada this year, if it hasn't started already.

Missouri is also home to this particular insect, and the last time there was a fairly large emergence was  in 1997. It was not very loud at our house because there was a great chunk of open land between us and the woods.

However, I cleaned houses then, and the noise at one of the houses, which was surrounded by woods, was quite deafening. I did not envy that family very much. The wife said the noise was making her crazy, and she was very grateful to have a job in town.

The sound they make is very different from the low-pitched buzz saw sound of the other kind of cicada that we hear on hot summer days.

The people who know these things say that our turn will come again next year. Even so, a few of these insects do emerge every year…

 ...looking very much like an alien life form.

This evening, in between the noise of big trucks and cars on the highway, I can hear the high, thin sound of a couple of them in the big oak tree by the house. It's not bad at all... sort of a soothing sound offering a little bit of competition to the "wind tunnel" tinnitus in my left ear. Not sure what it will be like here next year though.

Remembering…

My father, who is 88 years old, normally calls me on Saturday mornings at about the same time, so I usually organize Saturday morning so that I will be sure and be here when he calls. This past Saturday, we had decided to go to Town to have a meal in honor of Mothers Day at about the time he would normally call, so I decided to call him before we left.

He answered the phone and started talking about how he was waiting for my brother to come and pick him up for church. When he got up, he thought it was Sunday and that my brother was coming, so he had gotten  dressed in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes and waited… and waited… and by the time I called him he was beginning to worry that my brother was not coming.

I explained as gently as I could that it was Saturday, and of course he was rather upset and frustrated at himself for getting the days mixed up.

“Boy, am I ever dumb” he says.

“No Dad, you are not dumb. You are almost 89 years old and this sort of thing happens…”

I made light of the fact that he had forgotten it was Saturday and tried as best I could to smooth it out for him and assure him that he wasn’t going crazy.

I don’t know how much good I did. I suspect he fumed at himself for most of the rest of the day.

Fast-forward to this morning. I went to the post office to buy a roll of “Forever Stamps” because the postal service is continuing to hemorrhage money and the cost of a postage stamp is forever going to increase. I intended to pay for the $46 roll of stamps with the $100 bill I had in my money pouch. Only when I went to pay for it, I had some $20 bills but no $100 bill.

The only recent purchase I could remember was buying a card for my uncle who was recovering from an operation. Had I mistakenly given the clerk the $100 thinking it was $1? Had I accidently dropped the $100 in the store when I was getting out the $1 and change and not seen it?

Had I not zipped the money pouch all the way when I set it down in the car? Had some of the money slipped out and worked its way under the seat?

Came home and searched under the seats. I did not find the $100 bill, but I did find a card for a 2007 appointment at the urology clinic for the former owner of the car.

I tossed the wad of old receipts and notes from the car on the dining room table along with other assorted notes and receipts and stuff that has collected there. Richard tried to console me.

I started going through the scraps of paper and putting them in the trash, and then noticed a receipt over by the fruit basket and took a look at it. I had purchased a pair of athletic shoes on May 4. Paid $100 cash.

I have not forgotten that I bought the shoes – the ones am currently wearing have just about fallen apart. I have twice used coated fine cord designed for sewing leather to sew the seams that have come apart, and every time I put them on I think, “Should I just give up and start wearing the new ones now?”

I totally forgot how I had paid for them. What state am I going to be in when I reach 88? It’s a little bit scary.

A little bit of Henbit

Not too long ago, when it really did feel like Spring….

and life was bursting forth with vigor…

and Sprinter (spring + winter) had not made an appearance with light snow in some areas and some rather chilly temperatures, and…

it had not started raining again (which we really are not complaining about after last Summer’s drought) and brought a soggy halt to yard work, although the yard has been growing with glee…

Judy arrived at aerobics on a Monday morning feeling very pleased with herself that over the weekend she had finally finished weeding the strawberry bed but grumping at the volume of Henbit she had had to pull up…

Did I know Henbit? she asked.

I had to admit I did not. What garden we have is grown in half whiskey barrels, which cuts down on the weeds.

I could, however, tell her all about Lambs Quarters and how good they are to eat.

Not being one to not know something that someone thinks I might know about, I dug out my Wild Edibles of Missouri after I got home, and sure enough, there was Henbit and it is good to eat as a potherb and in salad

 

And I wondered around my yard looking for it and could find none at all.

However, I did find some growing somewhere else...

 

And I think it is is rather pretty.

So I told Judy about it and suggested she pull her weeds and eat them too.